I think it is safe to say that there are currently scrypt FPGAs in the wild or at least a dump truck full of new GPUs mining scrypt from profits of the past months. As these FPGAs start to ship out, the NVC difficulty will more than likely increase which will make the block reward smaller. Anyone else think we will see < 1 NVC PoW block reward in 2014? Talk about a rare coin!

For the reward lower than 1.00 we need a difficulty higher than 240000000. I doubt that it's possible in 2014.

Anyway, we can change PoW reward function to make a reward drop slower or faster, if this would be requested by majority of users... But this would require a voting like it happened with PoS reward function before.

We still need access to blockchain for proof-of-stake blocks validation. Currently CheckProofOfStake() uses the coin database to find the block height, and then scans that block to find the dependency of coinstake kernel.

Batch block connection during initial block download

This reduces the load on the database engine, as subsequent blocks oftenupdate an earlier block's transaction already.

As a result we've got a significantly smaller (~30% drop of size) and faster database.

We still need access to blockchain for proof-of-stake blocks validation. Currently CheckProofOfStake() uses the coin database to find the block height, and then scans that block to find the dependency of coinstake kernel.

Batch block connection during initial block download

This reduces the load on the database engine, as subsequent blocks oftenupdate an earlier block's transaction already.

As a result we've got a significantly smaller (~30% drop of size) and faster database.

We still need access to blockchain for proof-of-stake blocks validation. Currently CheckProofOfStake() uses the coin database to find the block height, and then scans that block to find the dependency of coinstake kernel.

Batch block connection during initial block download

This reduces the load on the database engine, as subsequent blocks oftenupdate an earlier block's transaction already.

As a result we've got a significantly smaller (~30% drop of size) and faster database.

WD wallets support is already implemented in the novacoin-hdkeys testing branch and works pretty well. So it's planned for integration into upcoming 0.4.4.8 release, but with one little change

According to testing results we shouldn't abandon the keypool approach. Instead of this we have to implement a separate and deterministic key pools for required purposes (receive, mining and change addresses).